The latest scandal to erupt from the Bush Administration comes from the colorful pages of USA Today, which discovered, through a Freedom of Information Act, that Bush has been paying conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote the Republican Party’s education policies in his newspaper columns and broadcast appearances. For 240,000 dollars of taxpayers’ money, Williams agreed to also influence other journalists to promote the Bush Administration’s policies in 2003 and 2004.
Some members of Congress have pointed out today that it is illegal for the federal government to use taxpayers’ money to create programs of propaganda. They’re calling for an investigation. So now the question is whether the Bush Administration will buy some more members of the media to argue against such an investigation. Oh my – it all gets so circular!
A delicious irony is that Armstrong Williams is one of those people who keep insisting that the media has a liberal bias. Maybe he categorizes all journalists who have not been bought off by the Bush Administration as liberals. I’d like to ask Mr. Armstrong about that, but he isn’t returning my calls.
There’s a lot of milk in this cow, but for now, I just think it’s important to note that we here at Irregular Times have accepted absolutely no money from the Bush Administration, either to promote the Republican agenda, or to just shut up and stop criticizing it.
Heck, for that matter, we haven’t been bought off by anyone to say anything. Unlike Armstrong Williams, we at Irregular Times are pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and paying our own way for this web site. We’re building this business from the ground up. In these days, when self-proclaimed conservatives are on the government dole, our independent entrepreneurship seems to make us very liberal indeed.
